This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Abstract

Nationally, wildlife-aircraft collisions (wildlife strikes) have been increasing over the past 25 years; denoted in the National Wildlife Strike Database that has been maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) since 1990. Increasing wildlife populations and air traffic coupled with quieter, faster aircraft create a significant risk to aviation safety; the cost to the civil aviation industry is an estimated $937 million dollars annually. USDA/APHIS/Wildlife Services (WS) provides technical and direct assistance to over 850 airports and airbases around the United States, including Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD). At ORD, raptors are one of the most commonly struck bird guild and accounted for at least 25% of damaging strikes from 2010-2013. An Integrated Wildlife Damage Management (IWDM) program is implemented at ORD to reduce the presence of wildlife on the airfield, consequently lowering the risk of wildlife strikes. Professional airport wildlife biologists at ORD concentrate much of their efforts on raptor management due to the high strike risk these birds pose to aircraft on the airfield itself. A variety of techniques are currently used to manage raptor populations at ORD. Concurrently, research is being conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the Red-tailed Hawk relocation program at the airport, as well as to assess their movements within the airfield environment.

Author Comment

This abstract submission is intended for the International Urban Wildlife Conference Collection.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Craig K. Pullins conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Travis L. Guerrant conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Scott F. Beckerman conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Brian E. Washburn conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Animal Ethics

The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

USDA-APHIS-Wildlife Services Animal Care and Use Committee

Field Study Permissions

The following information was supplied relating to field study approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

USFWS Depredation Permit

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

The raw data was not submitted for publication.

Funding

Add your feedback

Before adding feedback, consider if it can be asked as a question instead, and if so then use the Question tab. Pointing out typos is fine, but authors are encouraged to accept only substantially helpful feedback.

Follow this preprint for updates

"Following" is like subscribing to any updates related to a preprint.
These updates will appear in your home dashboard each time you visit PeerJ.

You can also choose to receive updates via daily or weekly email digests.
If you are following multiple preprints then we will send you
no more than one email per day or week based on your preferences.

Note: You are now also subscribed to the subject areas of this preprint
and will receive updates in the daily or weekly email digests if turned on.
You can add specific subject areas through your profile settings.